This was a heavy article that does stress the importance of having an intact set of ethical guidlines and a stong moral compass. It’s understandable considering the young age of the author when he created the code in question, that maybe it hadn’t been brought up to him that maybe it wasn’t right. It is kind of heartbreaking that he takes on the heavy burden of feeling responsible for teen girl suicides across Canada, but it’s also understandable why.
This article makes me a little mad considering he was, as he points out, just doing his job. But he was just a kid, and just a coder. While I do agree that we should ALL have a responsiblity to maintain an ethical decorum within our society, it is a little maddening for the burden of responsibility to be on the dev and not some sort of advisory board, or govern group. The world of ethics is made of fine lines and slippery slopes, however, if anyone should be feeling the moral responsibility of the souls of all those young women, it should be on the shoulders of the people attempting, so deceptively, to market the product.
Modern American capitalism has been driven by a singular mission: to bring value to the people who own company stock. Vox’s Matt Yglesias explains how this mentality leads executives to pursue profit above other worthwhile goals.
Therefore, for executives to set aside shareholder profits in pursuit of some other goal like environmental protection, racial justice, community stability, or simple common decency would be a form of theft. If reformulating your product to be more addictive or less healthy increases sales, then it’s not only permissible but actually required to do so. If closing a profitable plant and outsourcing the work to a low-wage country could make your company even more profitable, then it’s the right thing to do.
I was just curious about the project (had heard a little bit about it) so I read the article. The first quote above, while news to me, explains so, so much about the way America operates and why corporations would be winning class action lawsuits when their offenses were so wildly egregious, ethically deplorable, and many times effects were deadly.
BUT, but, even the moral waffling Google has done between creating a censorship engine for China and “don’t be evil”, it is amazingly comforting to know that the people who are actually creating the programs can and are ‘clapping back’:
Brandon Downey, a former Google engineer who says he regrets his role in helping develop the company’s first censorship tool in China (before the company backed out of the Chinese market in 2010), wrote a moving essay about what’s at stake:
Google is acting like a traditional company; one that squeezes every dime out of the marketplace, heedless of intangibles like principle, ethical cost, and even at the risk of the safety of its users…If technology is a tool, then it means the people making that tool have a responsibility to curb their tool’s misuse by playing a role in the decisions on how it gets used. And if the people who are the leaders of the company don’t believe this, they should hear it in plainer and clearer terms: namely, you do not become one of the largest companies in the history of capitalism without the assistance of the workers making those tools.
Amen, Mr. Downey, a-men.
Ok, wow. That was a lot. Look, I get it. All the stuff the author was talking about, like, that’s pretty crazy to think it’s not just sci-fi psych-thriller anymore but potentially the world we live in. You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that a lot of what this article is talking about is bound to create some off putting results. Monoculture=bad, pluralism=good. We get it. But the, then, pendulous swing that he takes when addressing his proposed new world order is, honestly just laughable.
Hear me out. It’s not that I think the ideas are dumb, quite the contrary; a lot of the ideas are really very well thought out and make a tremendous amount of sense. However, the grandious nature and presumption of innocence regarding the at large is niave at best, and dangerous at worst. For someone so educated to come up with these ideas and propose them with the implication that they would be the true solution to all of the problems previously laid out prior in the article is confounding. I do agree with the majority of the proposals, and find them moral contiguous with an ethically founded utopia, but the presumptuousness of the author in regards to the level of altruism found in our fellow citizen leaves me feeling uncertain and cautious about fully embracing the vision.
This may leave me looking cynical and bitter, but until I can see life through the rose colored glasses he is wearing, I’ll just “have what he’s having”!